Observations after playing Settler os Cat... I mean Kalguur

I'll start with the league mechanics. Frankly, I like the idea but there are some problems. First is how veiled the whole mechanic is meant to work. It should have been extremely clear from the start that sending X to somewhere would result in getting Y, not necessarely the exact reward but the types as well as how much you send how much return it would roughly net and how multipliers work and so on. Hiding league mechanics only makes the average player with less time feel less entusiastic to participate in it because they don't know how to properly make it work for them.

Secondly, the gold drop isn't enough, not by a long shot. For the average streamer that clears maps in 3 minutes and just keeps going, gold is not an issue but for the average player which takes far, far longer to do anything or get to any type of content, the gold just isn't enough to keep upgrading the town. Average players often get to a point where they can't generate enough gold to keep upgrading the town and pay it's workers.

Third we have the currency trade and that was a huge step in the right direction. For once I was able to have some currency because the abillity to sell things like scarabs wasn't locked behind needing to have enough bulk to trade nor spending too much time doing the actual trades with other players so great start. It needs some improvements however. First being more slots, 10 was fine but if players want to leave certain things in trade that may take a while to complete those 10 slots quickly prove to be insuficient. I suggest doubling the number of slots. The second isn't necessarely something that has an easy solution in sight but needs addressing. Sometimes the currency trading doesn't have offers for something and when it has it's only scams. To give you an example, if I tried to trade chances for chaos, they were going on the currency at 1C for 100 chances which is ridiculous. On the trade site they were going at 1 for 10 which is far more reasonable. The only way to prevent scalping is to make anything that goes on the currency trade not be listable on the item trade so they have to be sold there. Whether this has other implications or not I'm unsure which is why I said it's not necessarely an easy solution but there should be a solution to dealing with scalpers taking advantage of the currency trading on things that are just not being sold.

This is my thoughts on the league. I didn't really played a reworked ascendency so I don't have a huge amount to say about it though i wish Gladiator wasn't pigeon roled into using bleeding. It should have had a solid option to just go pure damage based.

Next are things I need improving in general for PoE to seriously keep the attention of average players such as myself.

For starters, I played what is probably the only build that doesn't has too much of a gear wall so that I wasn't going to get gear cheacked and being able to stop progressing like it always happens with other builds. It still had some rough spots but overall it did it's job but it's the only build capable of doing so at the moment which says a lot about the state of PoE.

We need to not have gear checks for progressing all the way up to tier 16 maps. Sure we may need to roll maps and avoid bad modifiers but other than that we should be able to do tier 16 with just a few chaos worth of investment and the reason here is simple, before red tier maps there is no currency to be made both because your atlas passive isn't developed to a point where you can even have a currency strategy (even more so because we need to spend a huge amount of points for map sustain alone) and because drops are absolutely terrible at lower tiered maps. Gear checks should exist for pinnacle content and side content like for example doing legion or delirium to just name a couple examples.

We also need for there not to be gear and skill checks to progress the the voidstones and I'd say even for the getting the favorite map slots. These are the basics of getting your atlas to just have fun farming the BASIC content. To give you an idea of what made me quit the league today, I was thinking of getting the atlas ready and prepare gear for a second character but then I realised just how bad getting void stones was. I didn't even looked it all up but first and foremost, it's all already locked behind pinnacle content which is unreasonable for the average player. The average player even with very good gear won't be able to clear that kind of content, let alone with the kind of gear he's likely to have. But then we also have the time problem. Even something like completing all maps to get the atlas points takes a lot of time, But then to even face maven players need to do 100 tier 14+ maps and 10 maven challenges just to get the right to fight maven (and they will not be able to win against maven either way). This is a ridiculous time investment just for a single void stone and there is still 3 more to go after that. Suffice to say that was enough to make me quit. There is no way I can get 4 void stones even in the next 2 or 3 weeks and I have much more time to play than the average player.

This is the biggest problem PoE faces, being able to keep the average player engaged when all the content says, it's too hard and it's too time consuming. It actually makes Korean MMOs seem better in terms of time investment needed and that is not a good look for PoE. With PoE 2 approaching and this seeming like it's the standard, I don't see PoE 2 getting any luckier at getting new players. GGG needs to get out of the mind set of everything they do it's done for streamers and for the absolute top players. That does not creates a well balanced game nor does it presents much room to grow past what it is currently.

Lastly and because this is a topic near and dear to me I will talk about spell totems which are still disastrously bad. We have Shockwave totem and ice spear totems and neither are good. Shockwave has a serious damage issue and even needs a ring before it is in a state where it can perform with minimal efficiency. It also doesn't scales very well. Ice spear can have good damage but the clear is aweful. At high investment where it can get the ice spear into the second form very fast it clear much better but well, that's high investment and spell totems should be viable both on low budget and high budget.

I think this problem is much clearer when we compare them to ballistas which on a 1 for 1 comparison just deal far more damage, have better clearing options and work on both low and high budgets. On top of this it's much easier to just get a higher number of ballistas than totems which again create this disparity between them. so how can we address this?

I think we should start by making the damage and cast speed penalties from the spell totem support gem being much lower, possibly even start low and at level 2 rather than a penalty we're gaining a bonus.

Next we need to just get more totems. We weren't just losing on damage output 1 for 1, we were also losing in number of totems so we should try and equal it. We get +2 ballistas on the ranger side of the tree but only 1 on the hiero side and the hiero comes with the downside of not being able to do damage himself where the ballistas get to still attack and do damage leading to a ballista setup and a mirage archer setup which is technicaly another balista while the player still is able to attack on top. At bare minimum, spell totems need 2 extra totems somewhere on the tree and this is in adition to the ascendency of hiero because again, we can't attack and ballistas can.

Tentatively, this should close the gap between spell totems and ballistas but it's possible it won't because again, ballistas 1 for 1 do so much more damage. If this isn't enough we can possibly split the more totems gems into 2 gems, one for balistas with it's current damage penalties and one for spell totems with less or no penalties but again, that is pending testing.

Lastly but not least and this is for both ballistas and spell totems. It is rather unfair that ballistas and totems get to be destroyed before they even have a chance to do anything. Minions got this problem solved by a cluster jewel notable that gives them damage immunity for 4 seconds after being summoned. Totems need a notable in cluster jewels that does the same to avoid ZDPS cases where enemies don't let totems live so they can attack. It would be equally good to see some more interesting things for totems in clusters like the abillity to remove the delay between summoning the totem and it being able to start attacking.